Batman Reborn
So, we’re now a month through the Batman Reborn ‘event’, it might be time to take stock of what’s been going on in the bat-titles ( I have of course reviewed a few of these titles here and here earlier…)
I’ve read all the ‘Batman Reborn’ titles except ‘Red Robin’, and it’s very obvious that despite the branding there is really no overarching ‘event’ going on at all here. Dini’s two titles are just unpleasant – Gotham City Sirens I dealt with before, but Streets Of Gotham is just as nasty in its own way, managing to combine mass-murder, child prostitution and continuity-wank into one perfectly horrible story.
I do wonder what on Earth happened to Dini. A couple of years ago his work on Detective was fresh and entertaining – fun, done in one superhero stories. But since around the time he started working on the egregious Countdown he has instead written some of the worst dreck I’ve ever read, and developed an obsession with Hush, a character that has not one single point of interest.
Meanwhile, the remaining title, Batman, is clearly the remedial readers’ title, as one would expect from a comic by Judd Winick and Ed Benes, with DIck Grayson explaining very clearly in words of one or two syllables everything that was implied by Morrison’s script for Batman & Robin#1 – that Batman is dead, that Dick Grayson is the new Batman, that he is not very happy about these things, and so on.
One could almost think that the new Bat-status had been set up specifically to educate superhero comics fans – “Look, this is what we call a good comic. GOOD comics can be recognised by having interesting stories, pictures which are nice to look at, and not leaving you feeling slightly soiled afterwards. THIS, on the other hand, is what we call a bad comic. In a bad comic, nothing happens that anyone could possibly care about, the women all look like stick figures with two circles drawn randomly in the chest area, and it makes you despair for the human race that anyone could possibly produce anything with such a grotesquely twisted moral tone. No, you CAN’T have the variant cover! BAD fanboy!” (smacks round the nose with a rolled-up copy of Gotham City Sirens)
One could think that at least, if one didn’t look through the comments on comics blogs. The comments to this post (I can’t link the comments directly, unfortunately) seem pretty typical – J.H. Williams’ art is “stagnant as the Dead Sea”, “confuses more than it clarifies”, “too hyper-realistic and stiff”, “tiresome” and “flashy show-off stuff that just distracts from the visuals”…
(Yes, that’s the J.H. Williams who does pages like this:)
bad art, apparently
So apparently the reaction of many superhero comic ‘readers’ when confronted with anything that might be called ‘good’ is to be scared and confused, because it makes things happen in their brain and that’s never happened before.
What’s particularly interesting is how much the two titles that might be called ‘any good at all’ rely on the quality of the art. Detective is a competent story with the best artist working in comics providing the art, while Batman And Robin is a very good story with the second-best artist working in comics providing the art. This is especially shown in Batman & Robin 2. This issue, the middle part of a three-part story, has very little in the way of plot, being almost all action, and most of that a fight scene, which provides a problem to reviewers like myself who can talk all day about writing but whose vocabulary for describing art stretches about as far as ‘pretty’.
It’s especially telling to compare this issue to anything from Morrison’s Bat-run from the last few years (other than the Black Glove story with Williams’ art) – the writing on those issues was just as good, but sometimes it was almost entirely unreadable, due to the artists not bothering with trivialities such as ‘telling the story’ or ‘drawing characters who look different from each other’. Here, even in a fairly story-light issue, the whole thing works, because Quitely’s ‘acting’ of the characters’ body-language and expression, and his layouts, and his staging, allow everything to move smoothly.
My favourite moment in the comic though shows what can be done by a good writer working within a superhero continuity. It’s the bit where Alfred talks to Dick about Dick’s ‘showbusiness’ background and tells him to treat Batman as a role. Not only does this work within the story, which is based in his background in the circus, while also illuminating things about Dick’s character, it also points to deeper things about Dick and Alfred’s relationship. Before becoming a butler, Alfred was an actor (under the stage name ‘Alfred Beagle’) and that shared ‘showbusiness’ background would be something Dick and Alfred would have shared, even though I’ve never seen it mentioned before in that context. So not only does it make sense that that metaphor would be one Alfred would think of, it illuminates their relationship by using a continuity point – but the story and that moment also still make perfect sense if you don’t know that.
That’s how continuity should be used – as something that adds resonance if you know it, but doesn’t detract if you don’t. Now, if only this ‘good comics’ thing would catch on…
Comics Review (Guaranteed 100% Michael Jackson Free*)
Sometimes there are comics that you can review before even reading them, and I was half tempted to do that with the two comics I’m going to review here. Going in, I knew exactly what I was going to get with these two comics, both part of the line-wide Batman revamp. Both feature female leads, in Gotham City, who have recently had serious heart injuries from which they bear both psychological and physical scars but manage to run round doing serious acrobatics and fighting in skin-tight leathers. One is extraordinarily good, the other is a meretricious piece of leering fanboyism.
Detective Comics, unsurprisingly, is the excellent one. It’s also quite difficult for me to review. I’m far more comfortable talking about writing than art, but the writing isn’t really the selling point of this comic for me.
Which is not to say the writing’s bad in any way – it’s Greg Rucka continuing the long story he started in 2005 in his parts of 52, and which has carried on through the Crime Bible mini and his Final Crisis tie-ins, while also reintroducing the characters for a new audience and adding a supporting cast and new villains to set up the Batwoman and Question stories as ongoing ones. Rucka does that competently and efficiently, (though I wonder how Batwoman’s father being a colonel works with her background as the daughter of an old-money family…) and fans of Rucka’s writing (like Debi ) will enjoy it. For me, though, Rucka is one of those writers whose work I’ll read if it’s there, and not seek out if it isn’t – on a level with Kurt Busiek or Mark Waid rather than Alan Moore or Dave Sim.
But Rucka is very much the weak link, relatively speaking, in the creative team here. The letterer is the great Todd Klein (actually not his best work – the font for Alice is very good but the rest is very standard) .
The colourist is Dave Stewart – the only current colourist (who doesn’t do anything else – I’m not here counting people like Jamie Grant who do other things as well) working in comics whose work I think actively improves the art – his work with Darwyn Cooke has been particularly impressive, and here his work is extraordinary. Most colourists for superhero comics tend to use flat colours, photoshop gradients or whatever to give a rather superficial set of colours that look more or less like the thing they’re meant to look like. I count three distinct palettes here, for different sections of the story, and a level of detail I’ve rarely seen – just look at the middle panel in the last page of the Batwoman story to see what I mean.
But the real star of the issue is J.H. Williams III. Williams is, without question, the best artist working in comics today. And this is where the problems come in, as I have less than no artistic vocabulary – all I can say is that I can look at even just his layouts all day, drinking in the sheer *design sense*, let alone his draughtsmanship, to say nothing of his storytelling ability. All I can say is that Williams tops himself with almost every page – he started out brilliant, and has only got better from there. Jog’s review makes a better fist of explaining the power of Williams’ work than I could, but still it’s fundamentally inexplicable – you just have to look at it.
In reviews, including this one, the backup feature – The Question – has been getting short shrift, and this isn’t really deserved. Rucka scripts this, too, and it will be tying in with the main storyline, and it’s a perfectly good story. Cully Hammer, the artist, is very good – he’s someone whose work I always enjoy – but he can’t help but suffer in comparison to Williams, and the colouring doesn’t help, being a similar enough palette to Stewart’s ‘superhero scene’ one to invite comparisons, but far less nuanced. Read on its own, it’s a decent little eight-page setup, but it’s just not as good as the main story.
Paul Dini’s Masturbation Fantasy Gotham City Sirens on the other hand, is just terrible, and a proof that the Bechdel test is a minimum, not a guarantee of a lack of sexism (and still less, of course, a guarantee of any kind of quality). (Incidentally, I didn’t deliberately buy this – the comic shop stuck it in my pull list because I read other batbooks, and my wife picked my comics up this week).
On paper, the idea of a supervillain team consisting of Catwoman, Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn seems like a reasonable one. You could make a decent mid-market series out of that, with a writer who could do character-based humour and action scenes – someone like Gail Simone or the Giffen/DeMatteis team. It wouldn’t be great, but it’d be readable.
However, the script for this is by Paul Dini, and despite his love for these characters (and for Zatanna, who *of course* makes an appearance) he doesn’t actually bother to distinguish them as people (apart from a couple of lines for Harley where she uses contractions). Instead, he just has them spout exposition at each other in interchangeable voices. While Rucka reveals character, motivation and background through dialogue – making Kate Kane talk differently from her girlfriend who talks differently from Batman who talks differently from Kane’s military father, thus letting us know what kind of people these are, Dini, however, has moved past such trivia as ‘characterisation’ and ‘depth’ (even of the minimal kind found in the Batwoman story), preferring instead to use dialogue to recap plot points from what I presume are his own later Batman stories (after I gave up bothering with his run on Detective) and the abysmal Countdown. There is precisely one exchange in this story that rings at all true as something a human being might say (the ‘Nigerian scam’ panel). – everything else is, at best, Claremontian.
But Dini’s writing here, bad as it is, is not the real problem. The problem’s with the art. Artist Guillem March actually displays some talent here. In fact in some ways he’s too good for the script – he has a facility for facial expressions, and manages to make the characters ‘act’ surprisingly well, and display recognisable characteristics – but this is working against the script rather than for it.
The problem is that he’s far more interested in drawing arses than actually telling the story. Now, I have no particular problem with mildly sexualised or titillating art in comics per se – it’s not something I have any especial interest in, but whatever. Some of Williams’ art in Detective has a definite sexual undercurrent, and that’s fine – it adds to the story.
But look at the bottom (in both senses) of page ten of Gotham City Sirens (I would scan this in, but I’ve not installed the drivers on my new laptop yet). A huge shot of Catwoman’s arse, for no particular reason. And Harley and Ivy’s heads *level* with it, even though all three are standing up, close to each other, and there is no suggestion of looking at them from an angle – no perspective distortion at all. The only way this panel makes sense is if Harley and Ivy are kneeling or Catwoman is standing on a box, but only for this panel. In the next panel, meanwhile, Harley and Ivy have swapped places for no explicable reason except that the artist was too busy drawing Catwoman’s arse to care about coherent storytelling.
These two comics, for all their surface similarities, serve as almost perfect examples of How To Do It and How Not To Do It – polar opposites, except for one unfortunate fact. Despite the fact that these comics have female main characters, and are apparently intended to appeal to the female comics-reading audience, only two of the twenty people credited with some creative or editorial role are women (the colourist on the backup feature in Detective and an assistant editor on GCS). Which is not to say that only women can write or draw or edit comics about or for women – that would be a ludicrous suggestion. But I *do* think that if the numbers were nearer parity (not just on these titles, but in the industry as a whole) we would have rather fewer comics where women are undifferentiated holders of tits and arse, and rather more where they’re people. But how do we get that parity when comics like Gotham City Sirens exist?
*(I won’t even mention that Catwoman says ‘blame it on sunshine’…. Damn.)
Whatever Happened To All Of The Heroes, All The Shakespearos?
There appear to be two schools of thought regarding Neil Gaiman among comics critics. One, popular ten years or so ago, is that he’s the greatest writer ever to have worked in the medium, and brings a new level of literacy and intelligence to the medium that no-one else can match up to. The other, which is increasingly popular at the moment, is that he’s a poseur – a one-trick-pony who’s mostly good at dressing in black and getting women who like Tori Amos records to swoon after him.
Ignoring the implicit sexism in the latter criticism (and a lot of the criticism of Gaiman boils down to ‘he makes comics that GIRLS like! Ewww…’) there’s a lot of truth in it – especially in his novels, Gaiman is an incredibly patchy writer, who does have a tendency to write the same storyline over and over (Coraline, Stardust, Mirrormask, Anansi Boys and Neverwhere are all so similar that I honestly think *I* could write a ‘Neil Gaiman novel’ now, and probably convince Gaiman himself he’d written it and forgotten about it), so I often tend towards the latter consensus. But then I read his *good* stuff (and some of those in the list above are actually good, but I’m thinking here especially of things like the short story collection Smoke And Mirrors) and I think that no, when he’s actually trying Gaiman is almost as good a writer as his reputation suggests. Not the very best, but up there in the top tier – around Dave Sim level, below Moore and Morrison but above Ennis and Ellis, probably around Peter Milligan level in the “British writers who became typecast as Vertigo writers” list.
The first part of Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader? was very much Gaiman-by-numbers, which meant there was a certain minimal level of quality which is far ahead of most superhero comics (and certainly ahead of any Batbook not written by Grant Morrison in the last decade or more), but it was still the kind of thing that someone trying to write like Neil Gaiman would have come up with – a group of characters gather for a wake and tell stories about the departed, and none of those stories ever quite match up. The stories of Batman are more important than the man. And so on.
But what it did do, quite effectively, was match up with Morrison’s work on the title – Morrison and Gaiman actually being more alike as writers than their surface dissimilarities would suggest, both having based much of their work on the idea that ‘all stories are true’, for example, which turns up as an ordering principle in both Morrison’s run on the title and Gaiman’s two issues.
This issue, the story takes a different turn – we see a few of the many possible deaths of Batman, done in the styles of different periods of comics history, so we see an alternate ending to The Killing Joke with Batman dying of Joker venom, a Neal Adams-esque Ra’s Al Ghul, and so on. Kubert actually excels himself here, turning in pretty good Dick Sprang, Neal Adams and Brian Bolland swipes/pastiches. Unfortunately, the inking by Scott Williams treats all these pages like they were Jim Lee, and the colouring similarly doesn’t vary at all. This really, really, needed a more sympathetic inker, rather than someone who treats every page as an opportunity to show how good he is at cross-hatching.
What works surprisingly well is the big reveal, which is that all this is taking place as a conversation between Batman and his mother, in his mind, as he dies, and that for Batman, rather than an afterlife or reincarnation, he goes back and is born again as himself, to repeat the whole thing over again. It’s really the only way that the story set up in the first half could sensibly end, and the only way you could really create an ending to ‘the Batman story’.
It’s also refreshing to see Batman’s mother playing such a prominent part – for the last couple of decades, writers wanting to work out ‘daddy issues’ have concentrated on Thomas Wayne almost exclusively, barely mentioning her (if nothing else you’d think that the fact that Superman’s mother has the same first name as her would make for a Geoff Johns ten-issue cryfest). Actually, for a small boy, it would probably hurt more seeing his mother die than his father – though of course either would be horrific – and the obsession with Thomas Wayne probably has a lot to do with the sexism of the comic industry. It also makes sense narratively that it be Martha Wayne Batman talks to as he dies, since it is her he gets handed to as a baby at the end.
(Incidentally, this reminds me of a pet hypothesis of mine – nowhere in Sandman is Death ever actually named, and it’s said that you see her twice in your life, once at the beginning and once at the end. My idea is that she’s ‘really’ called Delivery/ance…)
My main problem with this is the characterisation of Batman, who comes across as trapped in his childhood, trapped in the moment his parents died. Which is a valid interpretation of the character, and one that a lot of people have used, but it doesn’t work for me – to my mind Batman has to be characterised as someone who got over his parents’ death – if nothing else because the sentence spoken by Martha Wayne in this story – “You can’t bring us back” – isn’t true in the context of the DCU, in which Batman operates. Pretty much everyone Batman knows – Superman (who appears in this story), Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Metamorpho, Jason Todd, Ra’s Al-Ghul – has died and come back to life multiple times. A Bruce Wayne who was driven to become Batman solely because he couldn’t get his parents back wouldn’t make sense in that context.
That doesn’t matter in a two-issue ‘semi-continuity’ story of course – and I can’t believe I’m complaining about ‘continuity’ at all – but this story is explicitly trying to be the story that comes at the end of every interpretation of Batman’s life, from Bob Kane to Frank Miller to Adam West to Christopher Nolan to Alan Grant to Denny O’Neil. But the decision to make Batman a viewpoint character in the story at all means that of necessity it has to be one interpretation of Batman – an actual character rather than the idea of Batman – even though the story is about the idea rather than the man (or rather, it’s about the man becoming the idea).
So, I think I have to consider this two-parter a failure overall – the parts that worked were the parts where Gaiman was on auto-pilot, and the parts that didn’t were the ones where he was trying. But Gaiman on auto-pilot is still in the top 10% or so of comic writers, and the bits that didn’t work at least didn’t work interestingly. There’s stuff to say about this comic, which is more than I can say about the vast majority of superhero comics at present, and it makes me look forward even more to the upcoming Wednesday Comics series to which Gaiman will be contributing.
I’m also looking forward to the changes in the Bat-books – Morrison & Quitely on one, J.H. Williams illustrating another, and a third with Ed Benes and Judd Winick on the same title (so they can both be quarantined away from any comics I might want to read). This summer might be a fun one for comics after all…
(BTW I will be posting something about the ‘Newniverse’ idea tomorrow evening, when my migraine’s cleared up – I’ll probably post a review of the Zombies gig from Friday tonight though, as that’s the kind of thing I can write with my brain only half-on, as is this post).
ETA I stupidly posted the link to this on twitter and used Neil Gaiman’s Twitter alias rather than his real name to save space in the description, and he only *READ IT*… his response:
@stealthmunchkin the review itself was written OK but 1st two paras read like sophomore snark, and the “ooh icky girls” stuff was just bad.
Well, I suppose that’s fair…
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